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Sustainability and its Paradoxes: The case study of a big coffee roasting company in the Turin Metropolitan Area on the lens of systemic design

Format: Papers, RSD10, Topic: Cases & Practice, Topic: Socioecological Design

Chiara Campolmi, Mariaserena Di Giovanni, Domenico Devanna, Daniel Jaramillo Rueda, Tommaso Muzi, and Alisia Pellegrini

Coffee is one of the most important agricultural commodities in the world. Due to its economic importance and its growing worldwide demand, it is well-known that the coffee value chain is responsible for several wicked problems, mainly associated with sustainability. Systemic design seems to provide an answer to deal with these issues, by defining a structured and holistic process and promoting an innovative approach towards a sustainable and resilient future. This paper aims to frame the role of the systemic designer as a figure capable of proposing sustainable strategies with an innovative and transdisciplinary approach. The discussion is narrowed to the specific case study of a big coffee roasting company present on the territory of the Turin Metropolitan Area, which has been analysed on the lens of the SD approach. The set of tools and methods provided by SD has led to the identification of paradoxes related to the sustainability vision promoted by the company itself. Owing to the fact that the company also operates on the international scene, very often it tends to confine its interventions towards sustainability to localized actions, instead of considering the whole system made of inter-connections. The role of the systemic designer becomes crucial in dealing with these tensions and proposing solutions in order to strike a balance in the sustainability dilemma.

Keywords: systemic design, holistic approach, design for sustainability, wicked problems, coffee value chain

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Citation Data

Author(s): Mariaserena Di Giovanni, Chiara Campolmi, Daniel Jaramillo Rueda, Tommaso Muzi, Domenico Devanna and Alisia Pellegrini
Year:
Title: Sustainability and its Paradoxes: The case study of a big coffee roasting company in the Turin Metropolitan Area on the lens of systemic design
Published in: Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
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Article No.:
URL: https://rsdsymposium.org/
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First published: 3 September 2021
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Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (ISSN 2371-8404) are published annually by the Systemic Design Association, a non-profit scholarly association leading the research and practice of design for complex systems: 3803 Tønsberg, Norway (922 275 696).

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Open Access article published under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License. This permits anyone to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or form according to the licence terms.

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Author(s). (20##). Article title. Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design, RSD##. Article ##. rsdsymposium.org/LINK

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Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design are published online and include the contributions for each format.

Papers and presentations are entered into a single-blind peer-review process, meaning reviewers see the authors’ names but not vice versa. Reviewers consider the quality of the proposed contribution and whether it addresses topics of interest or raises relevant issues in systemic design. The review process provides feedback and possible suggestions for modifications.

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In 2022, the Systemic Design Association adopted the scholars spiral—a cyclic non-hierarchical approach to advance scholarship—and in 2023, launched Contexts—The Systemic Design Journal. Together, the RSD symposia and Contexts support the vital emergence of supportive opportunities for scholars and practitioners to publish work in the interdisciplinary field of systemic design.

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